In a recent issue of Investor’s Journal, TV show Shark Tank’s “Mr. Wonderful”, Kevin O’Leary is featured on the front page. He is touting that investments in traditional medically approved FDA anti-hallucinogenic psychedelic drugs are a far WORSE option for curing hallucinations etc. etc., than Cannabis and offer more profits and success in treating mental illness than conventional prescriptions. Whoa?

Decades ago, Timothy Leary was a Harvard professor who was experimenting with psychedelics, including mushrooms, cannabis and other concoctions he cooked up in his lab ON STUDENTS. His reason: psychedelics were a sure-fire way to treat mental illness. He was fired and discredited.

Current incantations include Ayahuasca, where people go into a STARK, DARK room, generally in a third-world country. Attention-seeking celebrities such as Chelsea Handler lie down and ingest a hallucinogenic liquid, vomiting afterwards into a big bowl provided for them, and returning back to life in a few hours feeling wonderful. Science is totally absent. So, what does this have to do with cannabis insurance?

It is a well-known fact, and Kanna Knowledge has written about it, that the cannabis industry has too much supply despite growing demand. To counter this, many, many businesses are making claims about the poor cannabis plant’s curative properties, which are false and misleading. Customers are encouraged to look for results that never surface or appear.

Cannabis is a palliative: not a curative. And for those of you in the business selling cannabis coverage please beware. The FDA, and other governmental regulatory agencies are so busy with Covid they have turned a blind eye to these facts: for now. In that same article, several companies are mentioned and being categorized as life science where the Federal regulations are minimal.

One leading this pack is Mindset Pharma which is led by a so-called leading “behavioral pharmacologist” and a “medicinal chemist’ with 130 owned patents. Their ostensible credits include work with Astra Zeneca, J&J and Glaxo. No specifics are given as to what work they did, what they accomplished for those companies, or their revealed educational levels.

They claim their novel canna-psychedelic drugs will revolutionize the treatment of mental illness and neuropsychiatric conditions. They purport that their cannabis-based compounds are safer and more effective than current psychotropic drugs. Is this true? But more importantly for us in the insurance business, what do insurance carriers and the broking community need to know about insuring this work? We need to be careful!

As a final word, who is investing in these new companies? A few names are Bill Gates, Google, Bezos, Eric Schmidt, Peter Theil, Buffett and Michael Burry of “The Big Short” fame. Do they know something we do not? Kanna Knowledge doubts that, but they and others can lose some money and not feel a pinch. Please be sure that when you are covering a life science nutraceutical/cannabis company that you know the product mix and efficacy of cannabis as a palliative only: not a curative.

That’s all for now: see you next time.

Michael B